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Exploration #6 - London Pirate Radio

Pirate radio is everywhere in London, born in the 60’s from rusting anti-aircraft towers in the mouth of the Thames. Today’s broadcasts are hidden in plain sight, transmitting from secret tower block studios via homemade rooftop antennas. We put our boots on and went exploring.

30 Below Story Contest—2010

 

Narrative is calling on writers, visual artists, photographers, performers, and filmmakers, between eighteen and thirty years old, to tell us a story. We are interested in narrative in the many forms it takes: the word and the image, the traditional and the innovative, the true and the imaginary.

 

Awards: First Prize is $1,500, Second Prize is $750, Third Prize is $300, and ten finalists will receive $100 each. The prize winners and finalists will be announced in Narrative.

 

All N30B entries are eligible for the $5,000 Narrative Prize for 2011 and for acceptance as a Story of the Week.

Click here to submit your work.

 

 

 

We accept submissions in the following media:

 

Written: Works of fiction and nonfiction, including short stories, novel excerpts, essays, memoirs, and excerpts from book-length nonfiction. Submissions must not exceed 15,000 words, and should be double-spaced, with 12-point type, at least one-inch margins, and sequentially numbered pages. Please provide your name, address, telephone number, and email address at the top of the first page. Submit your document as a .doc, .docx, .pdf, or .rtf file.

 

Drawn: Graphic novel excerpts and comics of no more than thirty pages, in .pdf format. Please include your full name in the title of the filename.

 

Photographed: Photo essays of between five and twenty images, previously unpublished (including Flickr, your personal website, stock photography sites, etc.). Images should be submitted in a low-resolution .pdf or .jpg format; however, upon acceptance, images need to be provided with a resolution of at least 300 dpi, as a .tif, .jpg, or raw format and that can be reproduced at 750 pixels wide. Captions or text should be included, either with the file containing the images, or as a separate document in a .doc or .pdf format with numbered captions corresponding to the similarly numbered photographs. Please provide your name, address, telephone number, and email address on the first page of the essay.

 

Spoken: Original works of fiction and nonfiction in audio theater, including performance, radio journalism, and stories read aloud. Submissions may run up to ten minutes, in .mp3 format, with a bit rate of at least 128 kbit/s. Please include your full name in the file name.

 

Filmed: Short films and documentaries of up to fifteen minutes. Submissions must be in .mp4 format. Please include your full name in the file name.

 

 

Timing: Entries will be accepted through October 29, 2010. (The contest will close to entries at midnight Pacific daylight time on October 29.)

 

Entry Fee: There is a $20 fee for each entry. And with your entry, you’ll receive three months of complimentary access to Narrative Backstage.

 

Judging: The contest will be judged by the editors of the magazine. Winners and finalists will be announced to the public by December 1, 2010. All writers who enter will be notified by email of the judges’ decisions.

 

Entries must be previously unpublished, though we do accept works that have appeared in college publications. Entries cannot have been the winner, finalist, or honorable mention in another contest. We accept online entries only. We do accept simultaneous submissions, but if your entry is accepted elsewhere, please let us know as soon as possible (and accept our congratulations!).

Click here to submit your work.

 

 

Fall 2010 Story Contest

 

Our fall contest is open to all fiction and nonfiction writers. We’re looking for short shorts, short stories, essays, memoirs, photo essays, graphic stories, all forms of literary nonfiction, and excerpts from longer works of both fiction and nonfiction. Entries must be previously unpublished, no longer than 15,000 words, and must not have been previously chosen as a winner, finalist, or honorable mention in another contest.

 

Prior winners and finalists in Narrative contests have gone on to win other contests and to be published in prize collections, including the Pushcart Prize, Best New Stories from the South, the Atlantic prize, and others.

 

As always, we are looking for works with a strong narrative drive, with characters we can respond to as human beings, and with effects of language, situation, and insight that are intense and total. We look for works that have the ambition of enlarging our view of ourselves and the world.

 

We welcome and look forward to reading your pages.

Click here to submit your work.

 

 

Awards: First Prize is $3,250, Second Prize is $1,500, Third Prize is $750, and ten finalists will receive $100 each. All entries will be considered for publication.

 

 

Submission Fee: There is a $20 fee for each entry. And with your entry, you’ll receive three months of complimentary access to Narrative Backstage.

 

Timing:  The contest deadline is November 30, 2010, at midnight Pacific standard time.

 

Judging:  The contest will be judged by the editors of the magazine. Winners and finalists will be announced to the public by December 31, 2010. All writers who enter will be notified by email of the judges’ decisions.

 

Submission Guidelines:  Please read our Submission Guidelines for manuscript formatting and other information.

 

Other Submission Categories: In addition to our contest, please review our other Submission Categories for areas that may interest you.

Click here to submit your work.

 

 

 

Posted by: lisaparavisini | October 3, 2010

The rising cost of living in Cuba

Juan O. Tamayo, writing for The Miami Herald, looks at how recent cuts in government subsidies in Cuba are an implicit admission that the cradle-to-grave safety net is no longer viable.  

Until Sept. 1, Lara, a retired Havana teacher, boosted her meager pension by reselling the four cigarette packs she bought each month with her government-subsidized ration card.

Lara, 73 and a non-smoker, bought them for 11 pesos and sold them on the street for 31, a 20-peso bump to her 260-peso retirement income — roughly $10.83 a month.

“It was a pittance, but critical to surviving,” she said. “But now they’ve removed the cigarettes from the ration card. What am I do? Go hungry! You can’t live in Cuba on 260 pesos.”

As Cuban ruler Raúl Castro slashes state subsidies to overcome an abysmal economic crisis, he’s making daily life more expensive — and implicitly accepting that the country’s cradle-to-grave social safety net is no longer assured.

Castro declared last year that the revolution’s promise of egalitarianism is no longer sustainable, conceding that Cuba will see growing differences between the haves and have-nots.

“Raúl is dismantling parts of the social safety net, and the social stratification based on income and the expansion of inequality will grow,” said Mario González-Corzo, an economist at Lehman College in New York City who studies Cuba.

Cuba’s recent announcement that it will cut 500,000 public jobs — and hopes to shift them to the now tiny private sector — sparked fears that tens of thousands will wind up jobless.

But cutbacks in state subsidies over the past year — especially in the rations cards that provide limited but deeply discounted supplies of food and a few other items to Cuba’s 11.2 million people — already have increased the cost of living.

Hit especially hard have been retirees, the disabled, widows and others who live on fixed incomes, and the 40 percent of Cubans who don’t receive remittances from relatives abroad and must rely on salaries that officially average a mere $20 per month.

“This is seriously complicating the survival of the Cuban family, which is already very difficult,” said Darsi Ferrer, a Havana dissident who has studied the impact of the vanishing state subsidies.

Except for the health and education systems — still free yet increasingly tattered — Castro has cut subsidies steeply in many sectors to jumpstart an economy thrown into a tailspin by declining export and tourism income and a dearth of external finances.

The government closed thousands of workplace canteens that provided free lunches to 250,000 employees, paying them an estra stipend instead. Its inspectors also cracked down on fraudulent claims for the extra benefits granted to some Cubans, such as those with ailments that require increased food rations.

In the central city of Santa Clara, inspectors earlier this year shut off 4,700 of the 7,000 people who were receiving the special assistance, said Oscar Espinosa Chepe, a dissident Havana economist.

The government also cut subsidies to its “popular camping” sites — where Cubans vacation at rock-bottom prices for tents or simple cabins, usually near beaches.

But the biggest impact came from the shrinkage of the food and personal hygiene items provided through the ration card, a 50-year-old system that Fidel Castro repeatedly praised as the best way to equitably distribute the country’s resources. Raúl Castro officially succeeded his brother in 2008.

Government officials concede it covers only half of a person’s monthly food consumption, but most Cubans say it covers no more than one third. The rest must be bought, at much higher prices, at farmers’ markets or the illegal black market.

In an island where the average monthly wage stands at 429 pesos and the average pension at 262 pesos — about $20 and $10.50, respectively — the rations’ cuts have been hard felt.

“The ration card was barely enough to live on if I had a glass of sugared water for breakfast and a piece of bread for lunch … “If they keep cutting it, I’m going to starve to death,” Lara said by phone from Havana. She asked that she not be further identified to avert government retaliation.

In the past year, potatoes and peas were taken off the card and their prices soared — potatoes from about 30 cents to about two pesos a pound, and peas from 10-20 cents to 3.50 pesos per pound. Cigarettes, allocated to all those 54 and older, were removed from the card on Sept. 1.

Rationed coffee went from 10 cents per four-ounce packet to five pesos for an equal weight of allegedly more concentrated beans. The ration for beans was cut by one third, and for salt by nearly half. And last week the government hiked gasoline prices by between 10 and 18 percent.

On the farmers’ markets, where prices are set by supply and demand, a pound of pork costs 25 pesos, one avocado 10 pesos, a mango 10 pesos, a pound of onions 20 pesos and a liter of cooking oil 35 pesos. Those five items alone would cost a week’s wage for the average worker.

“Salaries are already low and prices are already high, so the cut in the ration cards is falling hardest on the sectors with the lowest income — pensioners, those without outside assistance, those with the lowest incomes,” said Espinosa Chepe.

Havana residents said the capital is now awash in rumors that the government will cut coffee, eggs, pasta and personal hygiene items from the ration card next year, and that the three-ounce bread roll now sold daily on the ration card for five cents will rocket to 80 cents.

A lengthy editorial in the Communist Party’s Granma newspaper last October called for abolishing the ration card for all but the neediest.

Adding to the concerns was the announcement of the 500,000 layoffs — 10 percent of the government’s five million workers in a country with a mere 600,000 private sector jobs.

Several Cubans who are still working despite reaching retirement age have been told they will likely be forced to take retirement, said a Havana retiree who requested anonymity to avert government reprisals.

And the 10,000 retired teachers who returned to work two years ago, to take advantages of incentives offered by the government to ease a teacher shortage, now fear they also will be laid off, the retiree added.

Some government academic centers are disappearing almost overnight, he added, and retirees who staff most of Havana’s news stands have been told they will have to leave to make way for younger workers reassigned from other government jobs.

More than 150 of the 231 lowly paid chauffeurs assigned to the government-owned Gaviota hotel chain will be dismissed, independent journalist Carlos Rios Otero reported last week.

Espinosa Chepe noted that the layoffs come at a time when some Cubans are making a relatively good living by stealing from the government or working for foreign companies or as middlemen in the farmers’ markets.

“This is not an economy that is easy to explain,” he said. “People don’t even ask what’s the salary when they look for a job. What interests them is what’s there, what can be sold on the side.”

“There are two Cubas now,” he added. “There are a lot people earning a lot of money and a lot of others sinking. We are seeing enormous social differences, and each day they will be worse.”

For the original report go to http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/10/02/v-fullstory/1854187/recent-cuts-in-government-subsidies.html#ixzz11GT7xp4I

♋♋♋ Legacy In the Dust: The Four Aces Story ♋♋♋

Winstan Whitter’s ‘Legacy In the Dust’ is one film that refuses to go gently into the night. It’s a film about the Four Aces nightclub in Dalston, which for 33 years served as venue for generation after generation of Londoners from all walks of life and sharing one thing in common – a love of good music.

The Master and the Mistress

By ERIC FONER

Published: October 3, 2008

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum

Sometime around 1800, an anonymous American artist produced an arresting painting entitled “Virginian Luxuries.” It depicts a slave owner exercising two kinds of power over his human property. On the right, a white man raises his arm to whip a black man’s bare back. On the left, he lasciviously caresses a black woman. The artist’s identification of these “luxuries” with the state that produced four of our first five presidents underscores the contradiction between ­ideals and reality in the early Republic.

New-York Historical Society

Thomas Jefferson

 

___________________________________________________________

THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO

An American Family

By Annette Gordon-Reed

Illustrated. 798 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $35

___________________________________________________________

No one embodied this contradiction more strikingly than Thomas Jefferson. In 1776, when he wrote of mankind’s inalienable right to liberty, Jefferson owned more than 100 slaves. He hated slavery but thought blacks inferior in “body and mind” to whites. If freed, he believed, they should be sent to Africa; otherwise, abolition would result in racial warfare or, even worse, racial “mixture.” Yet in his own lifetime, reports circulated that Jefferson practiced such mixture with his slave ­Sally Hemings.

In 1997, Annette Gordon-Reed, who teaches at New York Law School and in the history department of Rutgers University, published “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.” Reviewing the evidence, she concluded it was likely that Jefferson had fathered Hemings’s children. But her main argument was that generations of Jefferson scholars had misused historical sources to defend the great man’s reputation. For example, they had dismissed as worthless the recollections of Madison Hemings, Sally Hemings’s son, who described his mother’s relationship with Jefferson to a journalist in 1873, while accepting at face value the denials of Jefferson’s white descendants that such a relationship existed. The book caused a sensation in the sedate world of Jefferson scholarship. Shortly after it appeared, DNA testing established a genetic link between a male Jefferson and Eston Hemings, Madison’s brother. Today, Monticello’s Web site discusses the controversy in a way that leaves the distinct impression of Thomas Jefferson’s paternity.

Gordon-Reed has now turned her attention to an even more ambitious pro­ject. In “The Hemingses of Monticello,” a work based on prodigious research in the voluminous Jefferson papers and other ­sources, she traces the experiences of this slave family over three generations. Engrossing and suggestive, it is also repetitive (we are frequently reminded that the law does not necessarily reflect social reality) and filled with unnecessary pronouncements about human nature (e.g., “Youth in females has attracted men in all eras across all cultures”). Readers will find it absorbing, but many will wish it had been a shorter, more focused book.

Gordon-Reed’s account begins with Elizabeth Hemings, born in 1735 as the daughter of an African woman and a white sea captain; she bore at least 12 children, half with an unknown black man, half (including Sally) with her owner, John Wayles, Jefferson’s father-in-law. (This made Sally Hemings the half sister of Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles, who died in 1782, after which he never remarried.) The Hemings family went to Monticello as part of Martha’s inheritance. Individual members eventually found their way to Paris, New York, Philadelphia and Richmond, allowing Gordon-Reed to pre­sent a revealing portrait of the varieties of black life in Jefferson’s era.

When she died in 1807 at 72, Elizabeth Hemings left behind 8 living children, more than 30 grandchildren and at least 4 great-grandchildren. The most fascinating parts of Gordon-Reed’s book deal not with Sally Hemings herself but with other all but unknown members of her extended family. Initially because they were related to Jefferson’s wife and later because of his own connection with Sally Hemings, the family was treated quite differently from other slaves at ­Monticello. The women worked as house servants, never in the fields, the men as valets, cooks and skilled craftsmen. Jefferson paid some of them wages and allowed a few to live in Charlottesville or Richmond and keep their earnings. Because of their independent incomes, her sons were able to provide Elizabeth Hemings with goods unavailable to most slaves. As Gordon-Reed relates, archaeological excavations have revealed among her possessions pieces of Chinese porcelain, wineglasses and other products of the era’s consumer revolution.

Their status as a “caste apart” from the other slaves did not diminish the Hemingses’ desire for greater freedom. In 1792, at her own request, Jefferson sold Sally’s older sister Mary to Thomas Bell, a local merchant, who lived openly with her and treated their children as his legal family. Three years later, Jefferson allowed their brother Robert to work out an arrangement with a white resident of Richmond to purchase and free him.

Less happy was the fate of Sally’s brother James Hemings, who accompanied Jefferson to Paris, where he studied cuisine. During the 1790s, James asked for his freedom and Jefferson agreed, so long as he trained his successor as chef at Monticello. A few years later, James Hemings committed suicide. Gordon-Reed sensitively traces the career of this restless, solitary man, acknowledging that “we simply cannot retrieve” his inner world or why he took his own life. Unfortunately, when it comes to the core of the book, the ­relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, she is less circumspect.

In 1787, at the age of 14, Sally Hemings accompanied Jefferson’s daughter Polly from Virginia to Paris, where Jefferson was serving as American minister. According to Madison Hemings’s account, at some point she became Jefferson’s “concubine.” When Jefferson was about to return to America in 1789, according to Madison, Sally Hemings, pregnant and aware that slavery had no legal standing in France, announced that she was going to remain in Paris. To persuade her to accompany him home, Jefferson agreed to a “treaty” whereby he would free her children when they reached adulthood.

Most scholars are likely to agree with Gordon-Reed’s conclusion that Jefferson fathered Hemings’s seven children (of whom three died in infancy). But as to the precise nature of their relationship, the historical record is silent. Was it rape, psychological coercion, a sexual bargain or a long-term loving connection? ­Gordon-Reed acknowledges that it is almost impossible to probe the feelings of a man and a woman neither of whom left any historical evidence about their relationship. Madison Hemings’s use of the words “concubine” and “treaty” hardly suggests a romance. But Gordon-Reed is determined to prove that theirs was a consensual relationship based on love.

Sometimes even the most skilled researcher comes up empty. At that point, the better part of valor may be simply to state that a question is unanswerable. Gordon-Reed’s portrait of an enduring romance between Hemings and Jefferson is one possible reading of the limited evidence. Others are equally plausible. ­Gordon-Reed, however, refuses to acknowledge this possibility. She sets up a series of straw men and proceeds to demolish them — those who believe that in the context of slavery, love between black and white people was impossible; that black female sexuality was “inherently degraded” and thus Jefferson could not have had genuine feelings for Hemings; that any black woman who consented to sex with a white man during slavery was a “traitor” to her people. She cites no current historians who hold these views, but is adamant in criticizing anyone who, given the vast gap in age (30 years) and power between them, views the Jefferson-Hemings connection as sexual exploitation.

As a black female scholar, Gordon-Reed is undoubtedly more sensitive than many other academics to the subtleties of language regarding race. But to question the likelihood of a long-term romantic attachment between Jefferson and Hemings is hardly to collaborate in what she calls “the erasure of individual black lives” from history. Gordon-Reed even suggests that “opponents of racism” who emphasize the prevalence of rape in the Old South occupy “common ground” with racists who despise black women, because both see sex with female slaves as “degraded.” This, quite simply, is ­outrageous.

After this rather strident discussion, which occupies the best part of four chapters, Gordon-Reed returns to her narrative. She relates how in 1802 the Richmond journalist James Callender named Hemings as Jefferson’s paramour and how throughout his presidency news­papers carried exposés, cartoons and bawdy ­poems about his relationship with “Yellow Sally.” Gordon-Reed makes the telling point that while Callender called Hemings a “slut as common as the pavement,” she was hardly promiscuous. She gave birth only at times when Jefferson could have been the father.

Neither Jefferson nor Hemings responded to these attacks. But whatever his precise feelings about the relationship, Jefferson certainly took a special interest in their children. Gordon-Reed notes that while other Hemings offspring were named after relatives, Sally Hemings’s sons bore names significant for Jefferson — Thomas Eston Hemings (after his cousin) and James Madison and William Beverley Hemings (after important ­Virginians).

In the end, Jefferson fulfilled the “treaty” he had agreed to in Paris and freed Sally Hemings’s surviving children. He allowed their daughter Harriet and son Beverley (ages 21 and 24) to leave Monticello in 1822. Very light-skinned, they chose to live out their lives as white people. Jefferson’s will freed Madison and Eston Hemings as well as three of their relatives. The will did not mention Sally Hemings, but Jefferson’s daughter allowed her to move to Char­lottesville, where she lived with her sons as a free person until dying in 1835. For the other slaves at Monticello, Jefferson’s death in 1826 was a catastrophe. To settle his enormous debts, his estate, including well over 100 slaves, was auctioned, destroying the families he had long tried to keep intact.

“The Hemingses of Monticello” ends at this point. Only in an earlier aside do we learn that Madison Hemings’s sons fought in the Union Army during the Civil War. One was among the 13,000 soldiers who perished at the infamous Andersonville prison camp in Georgia. I am glad to hear that Gordon-Reed is at work on a second volume tracing the further history of this remarkable family.

 

Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University and the editor of “Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World,” which has just been published.

___________________________________________________

Seeing Past the Slave to Study the Person

When, 11 years ago, DNA evidence convinced most experts thatThomas Jefferson had fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings, many people talked about what the discovery said about Jefferson. Yet few seemed all that interested in what it said about the young girl he owned.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Annette Gordon-Reed

Related

Time Topics: Sally Hemings |Thomas Jefferson

Enlarge This Image

Library of Congress

Thomas Jefferson, president and slave owner.

Annette Gordon-Reed was one of those few. Her 1997 book, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy” (University of Virginia Press), examined how historians throughout the decades consistently discounted the rumored relationship, ignoring the oral testimony of black descendants. Since then she has combed legal records, diaries, farm books, letters, wills, old newspapers, archives, relatives’ memories and more to rescue not only Sally but the entire Hemings clan from obscurity.

Their story is contained in her book “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family” (W. W. Norton), to be released on Monday. In nearly 800 pages she follows four generations of Hemingses, starting with their origins in Virginia in the 1700s and continuing through 1826, when Jefferson died and his home, Monticello, was put up for sale.

“I wanted to tell the story of this family in a way not done before” so that readers can “see slave people as individuals,” Ms. Gordon-Reed said, sitting on a bench at the slavery exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, where she will be speaking on Oct. 14 with Brent Staples, an editorial writer for The New York Times. Looking down from the balcony, visitors can see glass cabinets holding dozens of busts and statues, including a small one of Jefferson. On another shelf is a bronze cast of Lincoln’s face and hands.

When it comes to blacks in America, Ms. Gordon-Reed said, social history has trumped biography. “We tend to think of group identity instead of individuals,” she said, which leads us to “miss the complexity of black lives.”

“Robert, James, Elizabeth and Sally are not concepts but people,” she added, referring to the Hemings family.

Ms. Gordon-Reed turns over the decisions that Sally Hemings and her family made throughout their lives, examining them from every side as if they were a Rubik’s Cube. She refuses to accept generalizations and easy conclusions; for instance, she rejects the assertion that all sex between master and slave must be viewed as rape, saying it strips black women of the singularity of their life stories and their dignity.

As Ms. Gordon-Reed spoke about how profoundly strange life in Monticello must have been, a large monitor played a short history of slavery in New York City.

Sally Hemings’s father was John Wayles, a slave owner and the father of Jefferson’s wife, Martha. After his death, all the Hemingses eventually came to Monticello.

It is almost impossible to put ourselves in their places, Ms. Gordon-Reed said. As she writes of James Hemings in her book, “A man is born into a society that allows his half-sister and her husband to hold him as a slave.” Does he grieve when Martha dies, she asks, or when her child — his niece — is buried? Did he and his brother resent the fact that the man who controlled their lives inherited the fortune that — as John Wayles’s sons — would have been theirs had they been born free white men? And what did Jefferson, who gave his enslaved servants a relative amount of freedom and sometimes considered himself a friend, suppose of their feelings?

“The connections between these two men are so divorced from anything resembling what could be recognized today as ‘normal’ human relations that they can be recovered only in the imagination and, even then, only with great difficulty,” she writes of James Hemings and Jefferson.

And then there is Sally, light-skinned and beautiful, who apparently bore a remarkable resemblance to her dead half-sister.

Ms. Gordon-Reed tries to understand why the pregnant Sally Hemings made the decision to return with Jefferson to Virginia from Paris, where the law declared her a free person and where there was a community of free Africans.

She suggests that an insecure existence in a foreign country, away from her family, would be a frightening prospect for a pregnant teenager. Jefferson promised to free their children in exchange for her coming back to Virginia; she would have a home and a powerful protector.

All four of her children were later freed; three of them passed as white.

Joseph Ellis, a Jefferson scholar who had been wary of the claims about Hemings before the DNA tests, called Ms. Gordon-Reed’s book “the best study of a slave family ever written.”

Ever since she was a child in Conroe, Tex., Ms. Gordon-Reed has been interested in Thomas Jefferson. In the third grade she read a children’s biography of him that showed him as a child with a slave his own age. “Jefferson was smart,” she said, but the black boy in that book “was a person of no consequence and no curiosity.”

The depiction bothered her, she recalled: “That was supposed to be a stand-in for me.”

Before integration, her mother was an English teacher at a black high school; Ms. Gordon-Reed went to the better-financed white elementary school. She was the only black in her first-grade class. “Delegations of people would stand in the doorway,” she remembered, as if they were thinking, “Let’s see how this experiment is going.”

Though she was mostly accepted, she said, she did break out in hives, probably from the stress. The following year the schools were legally integrated.

At 14 she read Fawn Brodie’s “Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History,” about his relationship with Hemings. It was a book widely disdained by Jefferson scholars at the time.

Ms. Gordon-Reed’s fascination with history continued at Dartmouth, but by the time she graduated academic jobs were hard to come by. So she ended up going to Harvard Law School, where she met her husband, now a civil court judge in Brooklyn.

“I always wanted to come to New York and be a famous writer,” she said, recalling how in Conroe she would read copies of The New Yorker. Now she teaches at New York Law School and in the history department of Rutgers University in Newark.

More than histories, Ms. Gordon-Reed said she expects a gold rush of fiction about the Hemings family. “We don’t have any letters from her,” she said of Sally. “She is a canvas that people can paint on.”

Ms. Gordon-Reed plans to write a second volume that will follow the family up through the late 19th century.

About four years ago, Ms. Gordon-Reed’s family gathered for a reunion for the first time. She had doggedly researched Sally Hemings’s ancestors and progeny, but realized that she knew little about her own.

“I’ve started thinking about my family a lot more,” she said. “Maybe that’s the next project for me.”

Years ago a state highway was built to run right through her family’s cemetery in Livingston, Tex., so all the graves were moved, and a record was made of every one.

“That,” she said, “would be a starting place.”

>via: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/books/20hemings.html?ref=review

What our country desperately needs is a leader who loves us

Americans have been treated with contempt for so long that we have become inured to our own society's suffering

I remember seeing a picture of Fidel Castro in a parade with lots of other Cubans. It was during the emergency years, the "special period" when Cuba's relationship with the Soviet Union had collapsed and there was little gas or oil or fertiliser; people were struggling to find enough to eat. It was perhaps Cuba's nadir, as a small Caribbean island nation considered a dangerous threat by its nearest neighbour, the United States - which, during this period, tightened its embargo. Fidel, tall, haggard, his clothes hanging more loosely than usual from his gaunt frame, walked soberly along, surrounded by thousands of likewise downhearted, fearful people: he, like them, waving a tiny red, white and blue Cuban flag. This photograph made me weep; not only because I love Fidel and the Cuban people, but also because I was envious.

However poor the Cubans might be, I realised, they cared about each other and they had a leader who loved them. A leader who loved them. Imagine. A leader not afraid to be out in the streets with them, a leader not ashamed to show himself as troubled and humbled as they were. A leader who would not leave them to wonder and worry alone, but would stand with them, walk with them, celebrate with them - whatever the parade might be.

This is what I want for our country, more than anything. I want a leader who can love us. This is not what we usually say, or think of, when we are trying to choose a leader. People like to talk about "experience" and war and the economy, and making Americans look good again. I care about all these things. But when the lights are out and I'm left with just the stars in a super-dark sky, and I feel the new intense chill that seems to be the underbreath of even the hottest day, when I know that global warming may send our planet into a deep freeze even before my remaining years run out, then I think about what it is that truly matters to me. Not just as a human, but as an American.

I want a leader who can love us. And, truthfully, by our collective behaviour, we have made it hard to demand this. We are as we are, imperfect to the max, racist and sexist and greedy above all; still, I feel we deserve leaders who love us. We will not survive more of what we have had: leaders who love nothing, not even themselves. We know they don't love themselves because if they did they would feel compassion for us, so often lost, floundering, reeling from one bad thought, one horrid act to another. Killing, under order, folks we don't know; abusing children of whose existence we hadn't heard; maiming and murdering animals that have done us no harm.

I would say that, in my lifetime, it was only the Kennedys, in national leadership, who seemed even to know what compassion meant; certainly John, and then Bobby, were unafraid to grow an informed and open heart. (After he left the White House, President Carter blossomed into a sheltering tree of peace, quite admirably.) I was a student at a segregated college in Georgia when John Kennedy was assassinated. His was a moral voice, a voice of someone who had suffered; someone who, when looking at us in the south, so vulnerable, so poor, so outnumbered by the violent racists surrounding us, could join his suffering with ours. The rocking chair in which he sat reminded us that he was somehow like us: feeling pain on a daily basis and living a full-tilt life in spite of it. And Bobby Kennedy, whom a mentor of mine, Marian Wright (later Edelman), brought to Mississippi years later. He had not believed there were starving children in the United States. Wright took him to visit the delta. Kneeling before these hungry children in the Mississippi dirt and heat, he wept. We were so happy to have those tears. Never before had we witnessed compassion in anyone sent out to lead us.

The present administration and too many others before it have shown the most clear and unapologetic hatred for the American people. A contempt for our minds, our bodies and souls that is so breathtaking most Americans have numbed themselves not to feel it. How can they do this or that awful unthinkable thing, we ask ourselves and each other, knowing no one in power will ever bother to answer us. I'm sure we, the American people, are the butt of jokes by those in power. Our suffering not making a dent in their pursuit of goals that almost always bring more tragedy and degradation to our already fragile, disintegrating republic.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence. The money for their education has gone to blow off someone else's intelligent and beautiful head. Visiting a hospital, I see sick and frightened people who have no clue whether they will get the care they need or whether it will be 15 minutes of an incompetent physician's opinion. If we were loved there would be a doctor free of charge, on every block, with time to listen to us. Visiting our schools, I see no one has seriously thought about teaching Americans what to eat, just as no one at the national helm insists that we take sex education seriously and begin to unencumber our planet of the projected hordes (Earth's view) of coming generations She can no longer tolerate.

Our taxes are collected without fail, with no input from us; sometimes, because we lack jobs, paid with money we have to borrow. Our children are sent places they never dreamed of visiting, to harm and make enemies of people who, prior to their arrival, had thought well of them. Kind, smart, freedom-loving Americans.

When we are offered a John McCain, who is too old for the job (and I cherish old age and old men but not to lead the world when it is ailing), or a George Bush, or a Sarah Palin, how unloved we are as Americans becomes painfully plain. McCain talks of war with the nostalgia and forgetfulness of the very elderly; Palin talks of forcing the young to have offspring they neither want nor can sustain; both of them feel at ease, apparently, with the game in which their candidacy becomes more of a topic of discussion than whether the planet has a future under their leadership.

Where does this leave us average Americans, who feel the chill of global warming, the devastation of war, the terror of the food crisis, the horror of advancing diseases? Hopefully with a sense of awakening: that we have had few opportunities to be led by those who have the capacity to care for us, to love us, and that we, in our lack of love for ourselves, have, too often, not chosen them. Perhaps with the certainty that though we are as we are and sorely imperfect, we still deserve someone in leadership who "gets" us, and that this self-defeating habit of accepting our leaders' contempt need not continue. Maybe with the realisation that we, the people, are truly the leaders, and that we are the ones we have been waiting for.

I write on September 9, my father's birthday. A black farmer in Georgia, he risked his life to vote in the 1930s for a "new deal". If he had lived and not died in his early 60s of overwork, ill health and heartbreak, he would be 100 years old in 2009. Voting in November of 2008 for a candidate with heart I will honour his faith.

© Alice Walker 2008

Nine months after the quake, a million Haitians slowly dying

October 11, 2010

by Bill Quigley

Even the sturdier shelters like this one offer little or no protection from heat, rain, thieves, rapists, or high winds and hurricanes. A million Haitians live like this, or worse, and right now thousands are being forced out of these camps with nowhere at all to go. – Photo: Gallo-Getty

“If it gets any worse,” said Wilda, a homeless Haitian mother, “we’re not going to survive.” Mothers and grandmothers surrounding her nodded solemnly.

 

We are in a broiling “tent” with a group of women trying to raise their families in a public park. Around the back of the Haitian National Palace, the park hosts a regal statute of Alexandre Petion in its middle. It is now home to 5,000 people displaced by the January 2010 earthquake.

Nine months after the quake, over a million people are still homeless in Haiti.

Haiti looks like the quake could have been last month. I visited Port au Prince shortly after the quake and much of the destruction then looks the same nine months later.

The Associated Press reports only 2 percent of the rubble has been removed and only 13,000 temporary shelters have been constructed. Not a single cent of the U.S. aid pledged for rebuilding has arrived in Haiti. In the last few days the U.S. pledged it would put up 10 percent of the billion dollars in reconstruction aid promised. Only 15 percent of the aid pledged by countries and organizations around the world has reached the country so far.

With other human rights advocates from the Center for Constitutional Rights, MADRE, CUNY Law School, Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, I am huddled under faded gray tarps stamped U.S. Aid. Blue tarps staked into the ground as walls. This is not even the hot season, but the weather reports the heat index is 115.

The floor is bare dirt, soft from a recent rain. Our guide works with a vibrant grassroots women’s organization, KOFAVIV, which is working with women in many camps, and she encourages residents to tell us their stories.

Anne has seven children. She would really love to have a tent. She and her family live on a small plot of dirt 8 feet by 8 feet. Sheets are tied to pieces of wood to keep out the sun. Plastic sheeting covers the ground.

When it rains everything they have is soaked. She begs every day for food.

Therese has three children, 12, 11 and 9. She has lived in the camps since the quake. A few weeks ago when she went to get a bucket of water, some men grabbed her and raped her. Before the quake she worked as a street vendor but has no money to buy supplies to sell. She prays all day every day for help.

Caroline lived with her husband and three children in an apartment in downtown Port au Prince. The quake took her husband and left the rest of the family homeless. She was raped in the first camp she settled in. When she moved, she was raped again and fought back with KOFAVIV. She and other women set up their own security with whistles and flashlights to protect each other. They push the police to arrest. Her life is now in danger because the rapists know who she is, and she is vulnerable.

We hear from dozens of other mothers and grandmothers – Alana, Beatrice, Celine, Marcie, Rene, Wilda and others. This is what they tell us.

There is no electricity at all in the camps. Some have lights on poles that work some of the time. Many have no lights at all.

Imagine a child who is dear to you having nowhere else to play … or to live. – Photo: Ramon Espinosa, AP

There is no food. The children are terribly hungry. The food aid program was terminated in April and nothing took its place. The authorities cut off the food so people would leave the camps, but where is there to go?

 

Water is hard to find. For the people in Petion Park, water is delivered by truck to a central site a block or two away in the middle of several camps.

Thousands of people line up twice a day to get water before it runs out. In another camp we visited Sunday, Camp Kasim, there was no water at all for hundreds of families and none scheduled to be delivered until Monday at the earliest. Boys and girls surged around a pipe several blocks away trying to capture some water in Oxfam marked buckets.

People are coughing, sniffling and their eyes watering. Quiet babies are the norm. Many people have skin rashes and vaginal infections. There are several volunteer clinics but usually only the very sickest are seen because so many people need help. The biggest camps now have some toilets but not enough. Drainage is a big problem especially now during the rainy season.

Children cannot be kept in the suffocating tents. They play in the muddy paths. They would love to return to school but there is no money.

Security is a huge problem. Less than a dozen of the thousand plus camps have official security at night. During the day the police may come around or maybe the heavily armed MINUSTAH U.N. forces will patrol. But at night security forces vanish. With little or no light at night, tens of thousands of unguarded sheet structures and canvas walls offer thieves and gangs an inviting target.

Violence against women and girls is widespread. Women who go to the latrines at night are attacked. Some women talk of carrying rape babies. Others will do anything for the crudest abortion. When they go to the police and ask them to investigate, officers demand money for gas. Even those who pay the police usually end up frustrated. There is a sense of impunity.

There are an estimated 1,300 “camps” of homeless people in Haiti. Homeless people live literally everywhere. People are camped in the middle of many streets. Shanty structures are built right up to the edge of streets. Every park, every school yard, every parking lot appear to have people living under sheets or lean-to tents.

The most fortunate families live in modest plastic tents. The newest tents are royal blue with red flags with yellow stars on them – donated in the last week from China. Less fortunate families, and there are many of them, live under faded sheets stretched between wooden poles made from tree branches. Within the camps there are dirt paths – some only inches wide. Tents and sheet shelters are side by side – inches apart.

Evictions are starting. Churches are pushing people off their property. Schools which are reopening are turning off the water to the people camped in the ball fields. Some in authority are openly saying that people must be forced out the camps. But only 13,000 temporary structures have been built and they are far away from family, school, jobs and healthcare. There is no place to go.

The U.N., which effectively runs Haiti with the Haitians and the U.S., holds meetings nearly every day to coordinate responses to dozens of issues like security, food, water, reconstruction and gender violence. Human rights advocates in Port au Prince complain that no meetings are conducted in Kreyol, the language of the Haitian people.

Yet there is hope. The Haitian mothers and grandmothers we heard from are fighting for their lives. KOFAVIV and BAI and other grassroots human rights groups are speaking out, demonstrating, educating the people in the camps and working together for social justice.

During a torrential downpour Saturday, dozens gathered on folding chairs under the front porch overhang of BAI to work on how to get the U.S., the U.N., Haiti and the NGOs to do their jobs.

Together the people have a chance. As one woman who works against violence told us, “If there is one woman and one man, maybe the man will win. But if the woman uses whistles to alert other women and gets other women to show up, maybe the man will see he is going to lose and will run away.”

Meanwhile, Wilda and a million other Haitians are slowly dying from starvation, illness, lack of security and neglect. Nine months after the quake.

Bill Quigley is legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. He has worked in Haiti for years with Bureau des Avocats Internationaux and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. He wrote this article from Port au Prince with help from Laura Raymond and Sunita Patel. You can contact Bill at Quigley77@gmail.

"THE LAST LAUGH"

:: BREAKING NEWS :: J.Period Extends Olive Branch of Peace to Questlove in Effort to Resolve Skillz-Questlove Feud, Captures Peace Offering on Video ::

<p>"The Laugh Laugh": The Aftermath from J.Period on Vimeo.</p>

Download The_Last_Laugh_J.Period_Didnt_Do_It_Remix.mp3

No stranger to hip hop controversy, rap's most infamous ghostwriter Skillz presents "The Last Laugh (J.Period Didn't Do It! Remix)", the hilarious true story of a bet gone awry between Skillz and The Roots' drummer, Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson. Featured on Skillz, Jazzy Jeff & J.Period's new mixtape, Infamous Quotes (available at: http://www.jperiod.com/skillz), "The Last Laugh (J.Period Didn't Do It! Remix)" is proof positive that no one puts a story into rhyme with as much skill and humor as the million dollar backpacker himself. Look out for his new album, The World Needs More Skillz, available October 25. 

10/8/10 - 6:00PM UPDATE:
:: BREAKING NEWS :: Minister Louis Farrakhan Agrees to Mediate Settlement in Questlove-Skillz Feud, Calls for $10,000 Coin Flip to Settle Dispute
:: Famed for his prowess in hip hop beef mediation, Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam stepped in early this evening to call for an immediate halt to rising tensions between Roots’ drummer Questlove and Virginia rapper Skillz. As both sides prepared their legions of fans and followers for a bloody MMA match this Saturday evening, Minister Farrakhan called on both sides to agree to a sit-down, in hopes of resolving the growing conflict before bloodshed is required. After settling landmark hip hop disputes between Jay-Z and Mobb Deep, 50 Cent and Ja Rule, LL Cool J and Canibus, and more, Minister Farrakhan hopes to once again stem the tide of hip hop hatred, declaring the need for “rap peace, not rap war.” He also suggested a $10,000 coin flip, conducted impartially by the Fruit of Islam, to resolve the initial dispute. “I’ll agree to peace,” declared Skillz, “when I get my $10,000. Until then, no peace!” Finally reached for an official comment, DJ Jazzy Jeff also called for a peaceful resolution, proclaiming: "Can't we all just get along?"

10/8/10 - 3:00PM UPDATE:
:: BREAKING NEWS :: Skillz, Questlove Agree to Settle Out of Court, Resolve Conflict With Pay-Per-View MMA Bout this Saturday
:: Only moments ago in New York City’s 10th District Supreme Court, Roots’ drummer Questlove and Virginia rapper Skillz agreed to settle their dispute out of court... in the ring. Dropping his $10,000 lawsuit against Skillz, Questlove brought fight promoter Don King into the foray to organize a more appropriate hip hop conflict resolution: a Pay-Per-View MMA fight to be held this Saturday evening, October 9. “Frankly, I’ve got size, strength and MMA experience over Skillz,” declared Thompson, “So I’m not worried.” In response, the Virginia rapper simply stated, “Now he’s gonna owe me $20,000.” DJ Jazzy Jeff, who still could not be reach for comment, has agreed to referee the bout, which will take place at The Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City.

10/8/10 - 1:30PM UPDATE:
:: BREAKING NEWS :: Questlove Sues Skillz for Slander Over New Diss Record.
:: In an unprecedented move, Roots’ drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson appeared in New York City’s 10th District Supreme Court only moments ago to file a restraining order and lawsuit for slander against rapper Skillz . JPeriod.com was able to obtain a copy of the suit’s transcript, which cites Skillz for damages in the amount of $10,000USD and would prevent Skillz from going within 100 feet of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. When asked if the amount reflected an attempt to settle the score for the $10,000 bet Mr. Thompson lost to Skillz (the bet which inspired Skillz’ new diss record), Questlove denied the accusation: “That’s strictly coincidence. No further comment.”

10/8/10 - 1PM UPDATE:
:: BREAKING NEWS :: J.Period Remix Fans Flames in Escalating Questlove-Skillz Feud.
:: Mixtape Kingpin J.Period added to the growing Skillz-Questlove Beef today by remixing Skillz fiery new single “The Last Laugh,” then denying the remix, then sardonically naming the remix “J.Period Didn’t Do It!” despite obvious stylistic elements J.Period has become known for. The remix compounds the escalating feud between the rapper and drummer, which began early this morning with the single’s release. DJ Jazzy Jeff still could not be reached for comment.

ORIGINAL STORY :: October 7, 2010 ::
:: BREAKING NEWS :: Skillz Declares Rap War Against Roots Drummer Questlove
:: No stranger to hip hop controversy, rap’s most infamous ghostwriter Skillz fires shots at legendary Roots' drummer, Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson today in his new single, “The Last Laugh (J.Period Didn’t Do It! Remix)”, the true story of a bet gone awry between the two hip hop icons. Featured on Skillz, Jazzy Jeff & J.Period’s new mixtape, Infamous Quotes , “The Last Laugh (J.Period Didn’t Do It! Remix)” declares rap war on a$$-betters everywhere, proving that no one puts a story into rhyme with as much skill and incisive humor as the million dollar backpacker himself. At press time, DJ Jazzy Jeff could not be reached for comment.